Life Among the Cannibals
A Political Career, a Tea Party Uprising, and the End of Governing As We Know It
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A revealing memoir of how Washington is changing---and not for the better
During a storied thirty-year career in the U.S. Senate, Arlen Specter rose to Judiciary Committee chairman, saved and defeated Supreme Court nominees, championed NIH funding, wrote watershed crime laws, always staying defiantly independent, "The Contrarian," as Time magazine billed him in a package of the nation's ten-best Senators. It all ended with one vote, for President Obama's stimulus, when Specter broke with Republicans to provide the margin of victory to prevent another Depression.
Shunned by the GOP faithful, Specter changed parties, giving Democrats a sixty-vote supermajority and throwing Washington into a tailspin. He kept charging, taking the first bursts of Tea Party fire at public meetings on Obama's health care--reform plan. Undaunted, Specter cast the key vote for the health plan.
In Life Among the Cannibals, Specter candidly describes the battles that led to his party switch, his tough transition, the unexpected struggles and duplicity that he faced, and his tumultuous campaign and eventual defeat in the 2010 Pennsylvania Democratic primary.
Taking us behind the scenes in the Capitol, the White House, and on the campaign trail, he shows how the rise of extremists---in both parties---has displaced tolerance with purity tests, purging centrists, and precluding moderate, bipartisan consensus.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Though the winners generally write the history of events, Specter's account of the campaign loss that ended his 30-year Senate career is proof that a few parting words can serve as a pointed political epitaph. In this engaging, but heavy-handed look at the disappearance of the center in Republican party politics, Specter (Never Give In: Battling Cancer in the Senate) lays bare his resentments, and offers his knowledgeable, withering critique of brutal partisanship in national politics. After five terms as a liberal Republican, Specter famously and critics said, desperately switched parties and ran for re-election as a Democrat in 2010, prompting one disgruntled voter to call him a "political transvestite" as he headed to an electoral defeat. Describing the GOP's decades-long rightward drift, Specter engages in much score-settling and self-justification, from noting that Richard Nixon urged civility in his 1969 inaugural address to dismissing Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) as a "scorched earth partisan," and suggesting that his successor, Sen. Pat Toomey has "a reputation, as being, foremost, out for himself." Specter's basic message, though, is one of concern. "The vitriol and hatred on all sides is overwhelming," he writes, and from a man overwhelmed by heightened partisanship, the warning carries the weight of experience.